


lélio & ophelia

by firstaudrina



Category: Interview With the Vampire (1994)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-14
Updated: 2014-12-14
Packaged: 2018-03-01 09:15:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,282
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2767763
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/firstaudrina/pseuds/firstaudrina
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>Find me</i>, Lestat is saying in a thousand different ways, <i>find me find me find me</i>.</p>
            </blockquote>





	lélio & ophelia

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Evandar](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Evandar/gifts).



> There is a little bit of canon-blending here, with some things brought in from _The Vampire Lestat_ , but it isn't necessary to have read that to follow what's going on. Having seen _Interview_ -the-movie is enough! Warning-wise, there is some blood, violence, and death but it's all canon-typical and no more graphic than what was in the film.

1791

In the blink between mortality and eternity, blood on Louis' mouth and throat, leaves in his hair – in that moment, Lestat becomes certain whatever began between them is already ended. It's a bleak feeling in the midst of his triumph, but he knows, knows with sudden clarity, that he has already betrayed Louis. Bestowal of the Dark Gift is always a betrayal, that much Lestat has learned. It is murder, after all.

But anticipating the rapid disintegration between them is not the same as being prepared for it. The knowledge does not prepare him for the force of Louis' anger, Louis' hate.

Lestat is vain, there is absolutely no denying this, and he finds himself longing for the way Louis looked at him when Louis was mortal; half-gone with fever, his flushed and lively skin damp with sweat, Louis had looked at Lestat as though he were angelic, there to rescue Louis from his rotten life. Lestat enjoyed that – of course he did, it flattered him.

But now Louis stares at him hatefully across the table like Lestat is an abductor, as though Louis did not ask for this life. 

As though he did not beg for it, his hot, hot lips against Lestat's neck. 

 

 

1985

Louis is in disguise these days, or something like it. 

The publication of the story he conveyed to that young man once upon a San Francisco night has caused a phenomena of sorts amongst the undead. Louis became their greatest pariah, their spiller of secrets, a traitor to their kind. They want to destroy him; put him in the sun, perhaps, until all that is left is a scrap of ashen fabric and some tangled strands of hair. So he is in disguise. He doesn't much resemble the description given of him in _Interview with the Vampire_ , which had been partially on purpose. Gone is the long hair and tailored black suit; each night he gives himself a moppish haircut, dresses in thrifted clothing. A great wonder of the modern world, used clothing. 

He should have known that Lestat would do him one better.

Louis stands for five minutes in the bookstore, fluorescent light irritating his eyes slightly, and stares at the large display erected in the center of the store. Lestat's face glowers handsomely from a poster, half-submerged in shadow, all blue eyes and white skin. And mimicked on a dozen book covers is the same image, title emblazoned below his smirking mouth: _The Vampire Lestat_. 

_You are nothing but trouble_ , Louis thinks, and can no longer tell if it's indictment or admiration.

Louis takes the book to the cashier and pays for it, feels absurd. 

 

 

1793

Lestat comes home swaggering, his body lazy and hot with blood, better than any wine he's ever tasted. And what he finds is Louis pale and drawn, his skin ghostly as it clings to the bones of his face. Feasting on rats again, on pigeons and rabbits and squirrels. Lestat had planned for this. He fed close to home and arrives now with the blood still wetting his lips, daring and cruel.

Louis takes one look at him and tightens his jaw. 

"What?" Lestat goads. His tongue flicks out to clean the blood off his mouth – but not all of it, of course, just enough to tease. He leans close on Louis' right side, voice lowering to a murmur. "Do you know who I had? The sweetest girl you've ever seen. Red curls. Freckles all down her breast. She went as easily as going to sleep, but at the last moment she thrashed violently – waking into a nightmare, I imagine. Tore her nails down my cheek."

Lestat gestures at his unblemished face, already healed. "Couldn't have been older than eighteen," he continues. "Do you think she left a sweetheart behind?"

Louis' stillness is shattered by a sudden surge of anger; he leaps to his feet and grabs a fistful of Lestat's jacket like any belligerent young man who's had too much down at the local tavern. But instead of landing a blow, his eyes search Lestat's face. Fury and desperation and misery clash in his expression. Then he kisses Lestat once, very hard, a strangled moan escaping him at the taste of the blood. 

Before Lestat can react, Louis is shoving him so forcefully he stumbles against the wall. Louis leaves, storming through the French doors, and Lestat laughs and laughs, victorious. 

 

 

1985

Louis reads Lestat's book cover to cover in the course of a night, eyes moving with preternatural quickness over the words. He rents a small apartment in San Francisco with money hoarded for over a century. It is discrete and utilitarian and no one bothers him. When they look for him, it's always in houses on the Rue Royale. Louis has not been there in many years. 

He takes enough time before sunrise to feed but returns quickly to his coffin, to his book, and awaits the next night, when he can read it again. Why had Lestat kept so much from him? Why had he always kept so much?

Once Louis has had his fill of the book (or, more like he cannot stand to thumb its pages again even though a part of him longs to do just that), he goes out to purchase a television, a record player, and the assortment of albums released under Lestat's name and stamped with Lestat's image. Lestat's new turn as rock star is as unsurprising as it is stupid and bold. All he ever wanted was attention, and now he's got plenty of it.

Louis listens to the music and watches the videos, finds all the clues Lestat has left for him. Love songs for lovers who never loved at all. It's laughable. It's tempting. Lestat has always been very tempting: a luminous being come to soothe Louis' fever haze; a demon urging Louis to be very, very bad; and now a handsome body encased in leather, a voice mocking two hundred years of secrets. 

_Find me_ , Lestat is saying in a thousand different ways, _find me find me find me_.

 

 

1794 

There comes a time when Lestat is no longer certain that Louis will be there when he wakes each night. He prepares himself before each daily sleep for such an eventuality; says goodbye to that sullen face, those gloomy eyes, the silent accusations. Lovers have left Lestat before. It's not unthinkable – inadvisable, certainly, but not unthinkable. 

They have entered a standoff where Louis is too afraid to leave but too unhappy to stay, and everything Lestat does to bind Louis closer only serves to make Lestat seem desperate and cruel. He has lost lovers before. He does not wish to lose one again. And he needs Louis, needs Louis' asceticism to counterpoint his own insatiability. Or just needs Louis, full stop.

Into this maelstrom, Claudia is born. 

Louis is so easy to hurt. Louis positions himself for pain because he likes the taste of it far more than blood. There is no better pain for Louis than Claudia, no better vehicle for his guilt than one that gives him such joy. 

Lestat will always remember the intimacy of her creation. Louis' soft, stricken expression and his skin wet with rain. A blending of blood, an act between himself and Louis begetting a child only two killers could love. There is no undoing that. Whatever Lestat did to her, Louis did too, and vice versa: finally, a bond more eternal than death. 

Is that not the definition of family?

Though child is a curious use of words. Lestat sometimes wonders if Claudia was ever really a child. 

 

 

1985

They meet again. 

It's such a simple phrase, so unimpressive. They meet again. A century and change has passed them by, Lestat in the earth and Louis in the world, neither of them truly experiencing any of it. They meet again, standing uncertainly two feet apart in the balmy air outside Lestat's current residence.

It's too impressive to be merely called a house, this glass-and-chrome compound standing apart from the lush green of Carmel Valley. It's so open, so exposed, Lestat taunting everyone as usual. Come and get me, says all that glass. Here I am.

The last time Louis saw Lestat, he had been so destroyed. Louis remembers that skin like cracking paper, the ragged scars, the dull blonde hair. Louis had felt sympathy then but not much else. The loss of Claudia was too fresh for him to feel anything except that, and he blamed Lestat for so many things. 

He blames Lestat still, a little. Her loss is still too close, sometimes. But the Lestat of here and now is as handsome as he was the first time Louis saw him, whole and radiant. Only now he wears the clothes of a modern man – jeans, even. Black ones. A cotton t-shirt. Both items are still the very best in terms of quality and probably stupidly expensive, because Lestat has always had aristocratic taste. Looking at him now, Louis realizes he is glad to see Lestat. It's an unusual feeling, but there it is. He wants to put himself in Lestat's arms. 

Louis has let the past touch him so rarely in these last decades.

Finally Lestat says, "You couldn't have dressed up just a little? Mon Dieu, Louis, your pants have _holes_ in them."

Louis looks down at himself, hastily cut hair falling into his face. "It is the style, some places."

"If there is a downside to the modern world, it is the distinct lack of panache," Lestat says. His voice has that same huffiness to it, and Louis has a sudden desire to hear Lestat speak French again. "The old romance is gone. Everyone is so damned casual."

"Yes," Louis says dryly. "The downside is the _fashion_."

Lestat is staring at him unabashedly, as had always been his way. "But you are still beautiful."

"You flatter me," Louis says dismissively. "I didn't come here to be complimented."

"Then why did you come?" Honest curiosity wars with a touch of meanness in Lestat's expression, that meanness he enjoys so utterly. "Have you come back to me?"

"I came to see you." He leaves it at that. "When I heard of your return, saw your book, your face –" He felt something, and in the long years of feeling nothing, that was enough.

Softness steals over Lestat with a suddenness that is startling, though his moods were always mercurial. "Yes," he says, and that's it. That's all he says, with the inflection of someone who understands completely.

He puts his hand out, lays his palm against Louis' throat with his thumb pressing into the hollow between Louis' collarbones, his nails the shadow of a bite. "My Louis," he murmurs, little more than a breath, and pulls Louis to him, an embrace that Louis cannot help returning, his fingers clutching tight in the back of Lestat's shirt. 

 

 

1820

Claudia likes it best when Lestat recites _Macbeth_. 

"Why, Father," she says, "You could have been an actor. I think it's the only thing better suited to your abilities than killing."

A miniature queen in her armchair throne, she observes him with such keen eyes that Lestat would almost think she knows everything about him. She has never asked about his life before she came into it, and he offers so little (unlike Louis, who gave up family histories and old sins readily), but still she seems able to stare right into the core of him. 

"Such praise from my little Claudia," he purrs. 

The mechanisms of relationships are much the same, vampire or human, and Lestat sees echoes of his former life in Claudia. In her cool sarcasm he can hear his own voice and in his unintended distance there is something of his own mother. But it's ridiculous; for all that mortals mistake Claudia for his natural daughter on the street, she isn't – not natural, anyway. 

"You do have a talent for it, Lestat," Louis murmurs in his gentle way. He sits at the table going over their finances like he does at the end of every night. Unwillingly, a prideful flush rises to the surface of Lestat's skin, and he notices Claudia noticing this with an almost scientific curiosity. 

"Enough showboating for tonight," she says, hopping to her little slippered feet with womanly grace. She extends a small regal hand to Lestat. "I would like another bite to eat before morning."

"As you command, my lady." Lestat gives her an overly dramatic bow at the waist, and delights in the half-smile he receives in response. Louis smiles too, though he doesn't look up from his books. Lestat is greatly, deeply contented. Louis can give her tenderness and Lestat can give her violence, and some measure of happiness can be found in between. 

On the streets, which are mostly empty at this hour, Claudia rebuffs his hand, keeping pace with his long strides through force of will if nothing else. "Lestat," she says. "Do you and Louis make love?"

He looks down at her with some surprise, though her expression is perfectly indifferent. "In a manner of speaking," he offers wryly. "Would you say Louis loved me?"

She looks up at him, her lashes long and black as a doll's. "Would _you_ say he did?"

Lestat rolls his eyes though he feels his throat work in a swallow. "We are a family, you and I and Louis," he says, a note of finality in it. "Now come, before the sun rises."

But that night he finds his appetite diminished. 

 

 

1986

Lestat has taken to narrating sections of _Interview with the Vampire_ aloud to Louis. It is immensely irritating, so much so that Louis takes the book and drops it out the window. Not that this does much to deter Lestat.

"What was it you said?" Lestat asks, draped across their chaise with his long legs over the higher end, his blonde hair fanned over the lower. "'Spellbound,' was it? Spellbound by my sheer beauty?"

"I also said you understood nothing, and that's still true."

Lestat laughs, a bright and metallic sound. 

They share a London flat now, and it isn't altogether different from days past. Lestat decorates in the latest fashions, everything cool and modern, and he fills Louis' closet with tailored coats and cashmere sweaters. The difference now is that Louis will put on his moodiness for play, because Lestat likes it and finds it funny. He will allow himself to be pulled across the room by Lestat's unwavering gaze, will fold to his knees on the floor beside the chaise and bend his mouth to Lestat's waiting one. 

"I remember," Lestat says, his lips on Louis' jaw, his words low and easy, "I saw you first in a tavern. I watched you bare your heart for some cheat's bullet. And I wanted you badly then. You were flushed with drink and anger, absolutely delicious. I hadn't felt such hunger in years."

Louis kisses him to quiet him. "Remember too that I don't share your narcissism. My ego needs less regular feedings."

"Liar," Lestat says fondly. He pulls the tie from Louis' hair so he can sink his fingers into it. One of his first demands had been for Louis to stop cutting it. "But you never feed mine, so I must make up for the lack."

"Is this your way of asking for admiration?" 

"I am _always_ asking for admiration," Lestat says, but of this Louis is well aware. He slides his hand under Lestat's shirt, feeling the faint heat of another's blood moving beneath the surface of his skin. He parts the buttons from their thread with one quick tug and bares Lestat's torso, skin so pale as to be toned milky blue. His mouth trails over the exposed flesh until his teeth sink in just there, just below the ribs, a tender gap in the bones. Lestat gasps, his blood running hot into Louis' mouth and with it images flickering behind Louis' eyelids – the tavern, no, another, much older, Lestat a mortal man with his dark-haired lover. The sound of a violin. If the blood of humans is sweet wine, Lestat's is whiskey, and it sears Louis even as it strengthens him. 

Louis swallows before running his tongue flat over the pinpricks left behind, which begin to close as he moves up Lestat's body, offering his throat in return. Lestat takes the invitation, driving his fangs in much the same spot as he did two hundred years ago, taking back the blood Louis took from him. Words still come difficultly to Louis when it comes to Lestat, the untangling of old grudges and new guilt, hate and longing and love, so the blood is the only language he has to express what he feels. He hopes it can convey to Lestat how much he's trying, how much he values the newness between them.

Lestat's lips and teeth are stained red when he pulls back, and they kiss again, Louis dizzy with it. "Ah, mon cœur," Lestat says, "You do flatter me."

 

 

 

1865

Claudia has left behind a swath of bodies in New Orleans, and they always come in pairs.

They each have their predilections. Louis' is that he insists he has none. Lestat goes for the young ones, boys and girls on the precipice of their greatest promise, cutting buds from the vine before they can bloom. Claudia likes mothers and daughters.

This presents few problems when she takes them in the street. First she will pretend to be lost and afraid, crying her crocodile tears noisily until the maternal arm of a stranger wraps around her little shoulders. Claudia likes to take the mother first and daughter second, studying the child's fear like a dark mirror. Once she keeps the daughter waiting who knows how long – possibly hours, the human girl sobbing and screaming, until Lestat comes looking for her. Daylight approaches but Claudia lingers, eager for discovery. 

"I kept her for you," Claudia says, gesturing at the child, who cannot be more than six or seven. There is a streak of blood across the front of Claudia's white gown, and a new stolen brooch is affixed to her cape. 

"Such a little one is hardly enough for me, my dear," Lestat says. His nose wrinkles slightly, and he tries to hush the mortal child.

"Once it might have been enough." Claudia's gaze is dark and direct. She demands, "I want to see it. I must."

"See what, ma cherie, our discovery if we tarry much longer? Let's return home – finish this quick."

"No," Claudia says impatiently. "I want you to do it. I want to see you kill the child."

At this, the little girl wails louder and Lestat scoops her up to hush her if nothing else, though she valiantly resists. "Quiet, quiet, little one," he says, distracted, but Claudia is resolute and he knows there is nothing to it. 

"Just a little nip," Claudia says strangely. "It's just a little neck."

He does it quickly, conscious of Claudia watching, and afterwards feels drowsy, unsettled. He would like very much to be gone from this place, though why he couldn't say.

Before they go, Claudia pauses to arrange the girl in her mother's arms and the sight makes Lestat avert his gaze, as thought he hasn't seen sights more disturbing in his time – as though he hasn't caused them.

The next night Louis says, "Yesterday you came in as though you'd looked Death himself in the eye," so whatever had chilled Lestat must have been visible in his face. It annoys him that he is so easily read when he can never read Louis.

"That damned girl is getting careless," he says instead of an honest answer. "Mark my words – she'll have them hunting us down with torches soon enough."

Louis huffs a sigh and rolls his eyes, chides, "She learned it from you."

But Lestat had never taught her to leave a corpse to rot within the walls of their home, which is what she does: leaves a woman's body to decay beneath the blankets of her unused bed. A body tucked in so lovingly; so discoverable by the few servants they have, by the stench. 

"What did I say?" Lestat hisses at Louis, his heart a forceful thing in his chest. "What did I tell you – she'll bring ruin on the entire household at this rate –"

"She is a child." Louis' voice is patient but his eyes show strain. They both know she is not a child. "It's done now. Be gentle with her."

But Lestat has forgotten gentleness. 

 

 

1989

"You think I wanted her gone?"

Tonight finds them in a blazing row, which they aren't strangers to. Lestat's jaw is so tense a muscle in it is twitching and Louis' eyes are rimmed with red.

"Didn't you?" Louis says. "You resented her, resented the love I had for her –"

"She did slit my throat!" Lestat explodes. "Forgive me holding that grudge!"

"She ought to have done it to us both, for what we did to her." Louis scrubs a regretful hand over his face. "I deserved it just as much."

"But it would never have been you," Lestat says. "Because you both loved each other, and I was just something you had to escape."

Louis does not deny it, and the silence rings.

 

 

1865

Blood gushes from Lestat's throat faster than his clutching hands can stem, and everything is red at the edges of his vision, the only sound that of a pounding heartbeat. He looks at Claudia's determined face, the knife still clutched in her little hand, and Louis who is breathless and terrified but takes not a single step to help. 

"Goodnight, sweet prince," Claudia says with her adult eyes in her infant face staring down at him indifferently. "May flights of devils wing you to your rest."

It's her little joke, of course; Lestat would appreciate it were he not a bloodless husk on the sitting room carpet. He would never expect sentimentality from his little Claudia, but perhaps some measure of appreciation for the long years he spent entertaining her and hunting beside her, dressing her in luxurious little frocks and fussing with her shining curls. But no – the look in her eyes tells him she feels nothing for the time they've shared. It means nothing to her. He is just a thing she must be rid of, sunk to the bottom of the swamp. 

He has only one thought as he drifts listlessly in the putrid water, bony fingers reaching out to catch whatever creature dares swim too close. _I will have my revenge, Claudia. I will take back all I gave and more_.

 

 

1989

The rain is relentless outside their windows. Louis is tiring of London. 

For someone for whom time means very little, Louis has taken to measuring it meticulously. He has had Lestat back now for four years. It had been nearly four years when Claudia came to them, and Louis worries that perhaps that is the limit on the years they can spend together. Soon Lestat will take up with someone new, or Louis will. The idea is far from comforting.

But then there is Lestat beside him, putting a small, squirming creature in Louis' lap: a kitten, black and white with a splotch of brown fur at one ear. With a kind of fidgety unease, Lestat says, "Well, I can't expect one of us to write a book every time we have a misunderstanding."

Louis arches an eyebrow as he picks up the kitten. "Do vampires keep pets?"

"You used to eat pets," Lestat points out. He surveys the cat doubtfully now. "Perhaps we ought to start with plants. Though they need all that pesky sunlight."

Affection tugs at him somewhere deep, but outwardly Louis sighs. "Lestat –"

"Ah, but I know what you're going to say and I intend to head you off: I apologize. And I don't mean all these little tiffs we've had lately, I mean – I know I was wrong, then. I wanted to punish you both for never loving me, for daring to leave me. As you are perhaps aware of, I can be…well, a brat is the term I've heard bandied about most often, but I find it lacks poetry."

Louis tilts his head. "Shall I go mark it down in the calendar? Fifth of November, Lestat apologizes, national holiday instituted?"

"You _would_ , you who never forgets anything."

"It's rather difficult to forget when you make a production of every little thing."

"My own éclat come to bite me in the ass," Lestat complains. "It is who I _am_ , Louis. I must live with style."

"You ought to live with _silence_ , once in a while," Louis corrects, amused, and puts his fingertips to Lestat's lips to forestall a response. Lestat smirks under the touch, his sharp smiles like the flash of a knife in the dark.

"Once in a very long while," Lestat agrees.

Louis traces the shape of that smirk as he tries to summon the right words in the right way to express himself. "Lestat, we were… There was love between us, the three of us. You must know that." Lestat murmurs assent. "But there was anger too."

"I grow weary of the past, Louis." And perhaps Louis' problem is that he cannot release it. "Either we forgive each other or we kill each other, and in all honesty my money's on me to win."

"It always is," Louis says, unable to keep the smile from his lips. "Well. I suppose time will tell, will it not?"

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Podfic of margot_tenenbaum's 'lélio and ophelia'](https://archiveofourown.org/works/7244074) by [Poodleofhell (MephistosPoodle)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/MephistosPoodle/pseuds/Poodleofhell), [sweetdreamsgreenbeans](https://archiveofourown.org/users/sweetdreamsgreenbeans/pseuds/sweetdreamsgreenbeans)




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